Murders in Paris and Lessons Learned William Pfaff

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Murders in Paris and Lessons Learned

William Pfaff

PARIS, January 21, 2015 -- — This month’s murders in Paris have caused an upheaval in how the non-Muslim world views its Muslim citizens in Europe and the United States. This presents a bigger and more urgent problem than what the Muslims think about us, even when they kill us.

Their presence is the source of the crisis that both the immigrants and European society now experience, which is religious and cultural, and for that reason ultimately political and powerfully resistant to resolution. Not only for individuals, but for whole communities.

The Europeans had been glad to recruit post-1945 laborers but thought they would go “home” when Europe was ready to dispense with them. However, the immigrants had found their new home, uncomfortable as it may have been, in Europe. Thus has the crisis slowly developed.

Britain treated immigrants according to the imperial and colonial precedents, dealing with the communities they formed as their members’ own affair so long as British law was observed, officialdom dealing with the immigrants by way of the community or religious leadership that existed or naturally developed.

Britain accommodated immigrants in exceptional ways, sometimes supporting Muslim or Sikh religious schools (as well as permitting Sikh policemen to wear turbans!). The result was that quasi-ghettos developed, like overseas colonies, with Islamic banks and even official tribunals where Sharia law is applied in civil litigation.

France (like the United States) offered the other model, assimilation. France, well before the United States existed, considered itself (and was widely so recognized in Europe) as the model of western civilization (and equally, when the time came, as the model of Enlightenment and Revolution, and then of the modern Republic). Like the United States it believed that other peoples and societies would naturally model themselves upon France, and when non-Europeans came to France they were assumed to wish to adopt French civilization’s ways and standards.http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=711